The patron Saint of Homosexuals

Who is the patron Saint of Homosexuals?

Homosexuals have a patron saint too, here is his story.

The Saint who has become the protector of homosexuals is Saint Sebastian. There aren’t written documents proving the homosexuality of Saint Sebastian. However, its destiny was to become over the time a gay icon. The first to openly speak about it, was in 1909, Georges Eekhnond in his work “Saint Sébastian Dans la Peinture”. The following year, Gabriele D’Annunzio gave him the nickname of “the favorite” of emperors Diocletian and Massimiano. In the work “Martyre de Saint Sebastien” the martyr was played by a young woman and not by a man, not a surprise. D’Annunzio’s opera ends with the archers who, while killing Sebastian, shout out their love for its beauty. “The favorite” is actually an ambiguous term that could also indicate a role of adviser.

It is in the twentieth century that these ideas started to become more and more popular, making Saint Sebastian become famous in the Lgbt community. Famous to the point that someone started to call him “patron” of the community itself.

From the Roman and Byzantine era until the Middle Ages, Saint Sebastian was represented as a mature man. He was in fact in his forties when in 304 A.D. was executed, age that at that time was considered old.

However during the Renaissance the world of Art represented the spiritual rebirth and idealized the human being. It is here that we find the rejuvenation and aesthetic beautification of San Sebastian. Becoming a teenage boy, showed in perfect shape and without clothes on, to better highlight its beauty and physical fitness. In a paint, a young, attractive, half-naked and tied to an ancient column boy has attracted the interest of homosexual artists, allowing them to celebrate the beauty of the male body.

San Sebastian – Pierre et Gilles

In the fifth and sixth century many artists portrayed San Sebastian as a handsome young man with feminine features and with a gently sculptured body. This is seen by many art critics as an attempt to homoerotic depiction of the saint. Seeing in the representation of the arrows stick into the body of the martyr an explicit phallic symbolism, and allusion to an ideal of sadomasochism beauty.

According to Janet Cox-Rearick, history expert, at this time started the homoerotic literature around the figure of Sebastian. Among the XVI-XVII the tradition wants Saint Sebastian to be close to the homosexuals. As suggested by William Shakespeare in “Twelfth Night” and in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

Another expert in history, Louis Reau, in 1958 concludes: “[the fifteenth century] The circle closes, the connection between the sodomites, seduced by the beauty of nudity and the saint-martyr who is glorified by an artist not surprisingly nicknamed “Sodoma”, is accomplished.”